Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-05-29/News from the WMF

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• It's always hard to tell how much impact our public policy team has on things like this (I suspect it's not crystal clear for them, either) - they are fairly limited on editor communication to avoid poisoning the well and obviously they're the ones reporting it. That all said, communities will ultimately be happy if the one line summary of any legal changes in this vein reads "You're fine, keep acting as you are, the Foundation can buffer any changes without your notice". In this instance, this good article (with thanks to @FPutz (WMF) and JGerlach (WMF):, by the way - a nicely clear read) seems to do just that, barring the crisis circumstances. Nosebagbear (talk) 12:31, 30 May 2022 (UTC)
• Going forward, I just thought I'd ask - will we be getting a similar article for the online safety bill in the UK? That one looks like it's going to have some really problematic bits in, Wikipedia-speaking. Nosebagbear (talk) 12:31, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

  Hi Nosebagbear! The team published an article on this, if you're interested. Cheers, 🐶 EpicPupper ^{(he/him | talk)} 22:47, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

  Thanks for flagging @EpicPupper, you beat me to it! Eventually we will also produce a deep dive analysis of the bill, as part of this series on online safety bills. These are a little more 'in the weeds', the Australia deep dive we published today lets you know what level of analysis to expect. FPutz (WMF) (talk) 15:07, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

• Really good to hear this update, which is not something I would expect to be saying about EU legislation. The key for me is: It is our position that regulations need to target the causes, not the symptoms, of the spread of illegal content: i.e., the targeted advertising business model and algorithms driving profit for ad placement. Focusing on these aspects both gets at the root problem of the issue and avoids regulating non-for-profit websites like Wikipedia as if they were operated according to the same model. A very insightful and well-considered position from the WMF. Wikipedia should not be used as an excuse for laissez faire policy about the internet, as if it is impossible to distinguish between a non-profit volunteer-run encyclopedia and a for-profit corporate dictatorship (like Musk seeks to create with Twitter). To use an extreme example, we are not on the side of websites that knowingly host videos of sex trafficking victims being raped, but nor are we safe without some guarantee that, as long as we work to quickly remove such content, the WMF can't be held legally responsible for a bad faith actor uploading such pornography to Commons. — Bilorv (talk) 21:47, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

  Considering the progress of legislation in the rest of the West, the EU could only have done worse in legislating the Internet. (Following the notorious GDPR and Article 13, which also caused consternation among those proclaiming to uphold the rights of internet users and consumers) I'm hoping the pattern of applying different criteria to for-profit monopolists on one side, and non-profits and small businesses on the other, will spread to other countries in coming years. Daß Wölf 07:18, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

  While I certainly share your position on Article 13, GDPR is flawed but brings a set of positives - it's by no means a one-way set of laws. However, its relevance to Wikimedia are more things like the right to be forgotten, which the GDPR recitals don't set a great deal of detail on. So it's looking like it's being defined by data commissioner pseudo case-law and actual case law. On that front I suspect we'll see more and more (attempted) incursions on the France and Germany side, and fewer from others (including the UK, where though no longer EU, it's obviously in the DPA2018) Nosebagbear (talk) 08:17, 6 June 2022 (UTC)